Editorial: Time for Walcott, DOE, to stop 'nonsense' about Staten Island yellow-bus service

Staaten Island Advance photoNew York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott greets visited Staten Island Technical High School on the first day of school last week.

If, as we did, you did a double take when you read Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott’s statement on restoring yellow school bus service to seventh- and eighth-graders at two Staten Island middle schools, that’s probably because it was double talk.

The state Legislature passed and the governor signed a bill authored by Assemblyman Michael Cusick and state Sen. Andrew Lanza that returned yellow busing to all of Staten Island’s eligible seventh- and eighth-graders. That came after the city Department of Education in 2009 decided it could no longer extend the blanket variance that allowed these older students to ride yellow.

The variance had been in effect for more than four decades, but the DOE insisted that it violated the state education law’s “like-circumstances” provision requiring more or less equal treatment of all students within a district.

Department officials insisted that if they provided school buses for upper-grade middle-schoolers on Staten Island, they’d have to provide it for students in the other boroughs.

Of course, the trip to and from school for most students in the other boroughs is nowhere near as long or as difficult as the trip to and from school for Staten Island kids.

That’s why no one challenged the blanket variance throughout the 42 years it had been in place.

The DOE’s abrupt switch on school bus policy was not just arbitrary; it was dangerous. A 13-year-old girl at the School of Civic Leadership in Graniteville who had been banished from the yellow bus was struck and killed by a truck as she was running to catch a city bus.

The law reversing the policy was clear and straightforward: All Staten Island seventh- and eighth-grade students who would have qualified for school bus service in the past would get school bus service now.

But the DOE, clearly unhappy that its bus decree had been swept aside by the state, is now insisting that the law only applies to students at schools that existed before it ended the variance in 2009.

That tortured interpretation of the law means that seventh- and eighth-graders at two schools, the Marsh Avenue Expeditionary Learning School in New Springville and the School of Civic Leadership - the very school outside of which the little girl was killed - still couldn’t ride on school buses.

Mind you, there’s nothing in the law that explicitly or implicitly restricts school bus service. Only the spiteful DOE chooses to see it that way.

It’s nonsense, of course, and in the days after the law was passed, Chancellor Walcott professed that he was pleased that Staten Island seventh- and eighth-graders could finally be accommodated.

But last week, as he visited Staten Island Tech on the first day of classes, he said, “I am empathetic to the people who are raising the concerns, so I don’t want people to think I’m not empathetic to it. At the same time, I have to be conscious of the way we interpret the law.”

Huh?

He said there have been discussions with Staten Island lawmakers on the issue and added, “I understand what they’re saying, but I also have to be responsible for how we interpret the law, and the implications if we do something that’s different from the law itself.”

The blanket variance was in place every year for over four decades and Department of Education officials were the only ones who belatedly seemed to think it was against the law. Certainly state education officials never said anything.

Now, the law has been specifically changed to address the DOE’s “like circumstances” concern, and DOE officials are still searching for and finding non-existent technicalities to allow them to evade the obligation to obey it fully.

“I’ll continue to talk to people,” Chancellor Walcott maintained. “It’s not to be punitive. I don’t want people to think I try to be insensitive.”

But needlessly exposing students at two schools to dangerous commutes is punitive. We saw the worst that could happen when Aniya Williams was killed in the street near the School for Civic Leadership in June 2011

Come on, Chancellor Walcott. This is nonsense and a fair-minded, accomplished person such as you knows it full well. It’s time to end it.

Tell those in the DOE who are misinterpreting the law to back off and let these kids take the school bus.